The Magus, A Revised Version (8 page)

Four days later I was standing on Hymettus, looking down over the great complex of Athens-Piraeus, cities and suburbs, houses split like a million dice over the Attic plain. South stretched the pure blue late-summer sea, pale pumice-coloured islands, and beyond them the serene mountains of the Peloponnesus stood away over the horizon

in a magnificent arrested flow of land and water. Serene, superb, majestic: I tried for adjectives less used, but anything else seemed underweight. I could see for eighty miles, and all pure, all noble, luminous, immense, all as it always had been.

It was like a journey into space. I was standing on Mars, knee-deep in thyme, under a sky that seemed never to have known dust or cloud. I looked down at my pale London hands. Even they seemed changed, nauseatingly alien, things I should long ago have disowned.

When that ultimate Mediterranean light fell on the world around me, I could see it was supremely beautiful; but when it touched me, I felt it was hostile. It seemed to corrode, not cleanse. It was like being at the beginning of an interrogation under arc-lights; already I could see the table with straps through the open doorway, already my old self began to know that it wouldn
’
t be able to hold out. It was partly the terror, the stripping-to-essentials, of love; because I fell totally and for ever in love with the Greek landscape from the moment I arrived. But with the love came a contradictory, almost irritating, feeling of impotence and inferiority, as if Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her.

None of the books I had read explained this sinister-fascinating, this Circe-like quality of Greece; the quality that makes it unique. In England we live in a very muted, calm, domesticated relationship with what remains of our natural landscape and its soft northern light; in Greece landscape and light are so beautiful, so all-present, so intense, so wild, that the relationship is immediately love-hatred, one of passion. It took me many months to understand this, and many years to accept it.

Later that day I was standing at the window of a room in the hotel to which the bored young man who received me at the British Council had directed me. I had just written a letter to Alison, but already she seemed far away, not in distance, not in time, but in some dimension for which there is no name. Reality, perhaps. I looked down over Constitution Square, the central meeting-place of Athens, over knots of strolling people, white shirts, dark glasses, bare brown arms. A sibilant murmur rose
from the crowds sitting at the
cafe tables. It was as hot as a hot English July day, and the sky was still perfectly clear. By craning out and looking east I could see Hymettus, where I had stood that morning, its sunset-facing slope an intense soft violet-pink, like a cyclamen. In the other direction, over the clutter of roofs, lay the massive black silhouette of the Acropolis. It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.

Phraxos lay eight dazzling hours in a small steamer south of Athens,
about six miles
off
the mainland of the Peloponnesus and in the centre
of a landscape as memorable as itself: to the north and west, a great fixed arm of mountains, in whose crook the island stood; to the east a distant gently-peaked archipelago; to the south the soft blue desert of the Aegean stretching away to Crete. Phraxos was beautiful. There was no other adjective; it was not just pretty, picturesque, charming
–
it was simply and effortlessly beautiful. It took my breath away
when I first saw it, floating under Venus like a majestic black whale in
an amethyst evening sea, and it still takes my breath away when I shut my eyes now and remember it. Its beauty was rare even in the Aegean, because its hills were covered with pine trees, Mediterranean
pines as light as greenfinch feathers. Nine-tenths of the island was un
inhabited and uncultivated: nothing but pines, coves, silence, sea. Herded into one corner, the north-west, lay a spectacular agglomeration of snow-white houses round a couple of small harbours.

But there were two eyesores, visible long before we landed. One was an obese Greek-Edwardian hotel near the larger of the two harbours, as at home on Phraxos as a hansom cab in a Doric temple. The other, equally at odds with the landscape, stood on the outskirts of the village and dwarfed the cottages around it: a dauntingly long building several storeys high and reminiscent, in spite of its ornate Corinthian facade, of a factory
–
a likeness more than
just visually apt, as I was to discover.

But the Lord Byron School, the Hotel Philadelphia, and the village apart, the body of the island, all thirty square miles of it, was virgin. There were some silvery olive-orchards and a few patches of terrace cultivation on the steep slopes o
f the north coast, but the rest
was primeval pine-forest. There were no antiquities. The ancient Greeks never much liked the taste of cistern-water.

This lack of open water meant also that there were no wild animals and few birds on the island. Its distinguishing characteristic, away from the village, was silence. Out on the hills one might pass a goatherd and his winter flock (in summer there was no grazing) of bronze-belled goats, or a bowed peasant-woman carrying a huge faggot, or a resin-gatherer; but one very rarely did. It was the world before the machine, almost before man, and what small events happened
–
the passage of a shrike, the discovery of a new path, a glimpse of a distant caique far below
–
took on an unaccountable significance, as if they were isolated, framed, magnified by solitude. It was the least eerie, the most un-Nordic solitude in the world. Fear had never touched the island. If it was haunted, it was by nymphs, not monsters.

I was forced to go frequently for walks to escape the claustrophobic ambience of the Lord Byron School. To begin with there was something pleasantly absurd about teaching in a boarding school (run on supposedly Eton-Harrow lines) only a look north from where Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon. Certainly the masters, victims of a country with only two universities, were academically of a far higher standard than Mitford had suggested, and in themselves the boys were no better and no worse than boys the world over. But they were ruthlessly pragmatic about English. They cared nothing for literature, and everything for science. If I tried to read the school eponym
’
s poetry with them, they yawned; if I taught the English names for the parts of a car, I had trouble getting them out of the class at lesson
’
s end; and often they would bring me American scientific textbooks full of terms that were just as much Greek to me
as the expectant faces waiting for a simple paraphrase.

Both boys and masters loathed the island, and regarded it as a sort of self-imposed penal settlement where one came to work, work, work. I had imagined something far sleepier than an English school, and instead it was far tougher. The crowning irony was that this obsessive industry, this mole-like blindness to their natural environment, was what was considered to be so typically English about the system. Perhaps to Greeks, made blase by living among the most beautiful landscapes in the world,
there was nothing discordant in
being cooped up in such a termitary; but it drove me mad with irritation.

One or two of the masters spoke some English, and several French, but I found little in common with them. The only one I could tolerate was Demetriades, the other teacher of English, and that was solely because he spoke and understood the language so much more fluently than anyone else. With him I could rise out of Basic.

He took me round the village
kapheneia
and tavernas, and I got a taste for Greek food and Greek folk music. But there was always something mournful about the place in daylight. There were so many villas boarded up; there were so few people in the alley-streets;
one had always to go to the same two better-class tavernas for a meal,
and one met the same old faces, a stale Levantine provincial society that belonged more to the world of the Ottoman Empire, Balzac in a fez, than to the 1950s. I had to agree with Mitford: it was desperately dull. I tried one or two of the fishermen
’
s wineshops. They were jollier, but I felt they felt I was slumming; and my Greek never rose to the island dialect they spoke.

I made inquiries about the man Mitford had had a row with, but no one seemed to have heard of either him or it; or, for that matter, of the
‘
waiting-room
’
. Mitford had evidently spent a lot of time in the village, and made himself unpopular with other masters besides Demetriades. There was also a heavy aftermath of anglophobia, aggravated by the political situation at that time, to be endured.

Soon I took to the hills. None of the other masters ever stirred an inch farther than they needed to, and the boys were not allowed beyond the
chevaux defrise
of the high-walled school grounds except on Sundays, and then only for the half-mile along the coast road to the village. The hills were always intoxicatingly clean and light and remote. With no company but my own boredom, I began for the first time in my life to look at nature, and to regret that I knew its language as little as I knew Greek. I became aware of stones, birds, flowers, land, in a new way, and the walking, the swimming, the magnificent climate, the absence of all traffic, ground or air
–
for there wasn
’
t a single car on the island, there being no roads outside the village, and aeroplanes passed over not once a month
–
these things made me feel healthier than I h
ad ever felt before. I began to
get some sort of harmony between body and mind; or so it seemed. It was an illusion.

There had been a letter from Alison waiting for me when I arrived at the school. It was very brief. She must have written it at work the day I left London.

I love you, you can
’
t understand what that means because you
’
ve never loved anyone yourself. It
’
s what I
’
ve been trying
to make you see this last week. All I want to say is that one day,
when you do fall in love, remember today. Remember I kissed you and walked out of the room. Remember I walked all the way down the street and never once looked back. I knew you were watching. Remember I did all this and I love you. If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.

Another letter came from her the next day. It contained nothing but my cheque torn in two and a scribble on the back of one half:
‘
No thanks.
’
And two days later there was a third letter, full of enthusiasm for some film she had been to see, almost a chatty letter. But at the end she wrote:
‘
Forget the first letter I sent you. I was so upset. It
’
s all over now. I won
’
t be old-fashioned again.
’

Of course I wrote back, if not every day, two or three times a week; long letters full of self-excuse and self-justification, until one day she wrote,

Please don
’
t go on so about you and me. Tell me about things, about the island, the school. I know what you are. So be what you are. When you write about things I can think I
’
m with you, seeing them with you. And don
’
t be
off
ended. Forgiving
’
s forgetting.

Imperceptibly information took the place of emotion in our letters. She wrote to me about her work, a girl she had become friendly with, about minor domestic things, films, books. I wrote about the school and the island, as
she asked. One day there was a
photograph of her in her uniform. She
’
d had her hair cut short and it was tucked back under her fore-and-aft cap. She was smiling, but the uniform and the smile combined gave her an insincere, professional look; she had become, the photo sharply warned me, someone not the someone I liked to remember; the private, the uniquely my, Alison. And then the letters became once-weekly. The physical ache I had felt for her during the first month seemed to disappear; there were still times when I knew I wanted her very much, and would have given anything to have her in bed beside me. But they were moments of sexual frustration, not regretted love. One day I thought: if I wasn
’
t on this island I should be dropping this girl. The writing of the letters had become as often as not more of a chore than a pleasure, and I didn
’
t hurry back to my room after dinner to write them
–
I scribbled them
off
hurriedly in class and got a boy to run down to the gate at the last minute to give them to the school postman.

At half-term I went with Demetriades to Athens. He wanted to take me to his favourite brothel, in a suburb. He assured me the girls were clean. I hesitated, then
–
isn
’
t it a poet
’
s, to say nothing of a cynic
’
s, moral duty to be immoral?
– I
went. When we came out, it was raining, and the shadowing wet leaves on the lower branches of a eucalyptus, caught under a light in the entrance, made me remember our bedroom in Russell Square. But Alison and London were gone, dead, exorcized; I had cut them away from my life. I decided I would write a letter to Alison that night, to say that I didn
’
t want to hear from her again. I was too drunk by the time we got back to the hotel, and I don
’
t know what I would have said. Perhaps that I had proved beyond doubt that I was not worth waiting for; perhaps that she bored me; perhaps that I was lonelier than ever
–
and wanted to stay that way. As it was, I sent her a postcard telling her nothing; and on the last day I went back to the brot
hel alone. But the Lebanese nym
phet I coveted was taken, and I didn
’
t fancy the others.

December came, and we were still writing letters. I knew she was hiding things from me. Her life, as she described it, was too simple and manless to be true. When the final letter came, I was not surprised. What I hadn
’
t expected was how bitter I should feel, and how betrayed. It was less a sexual jealousy of the man than an envy of Alison; moments of tenderness and
togetherness, moments when the
otherness of the other disappeared, flooded back through my mind for days afterwards, like sequences from some cheap romantic film that I certainly didn
’
t want to remember, but did; and there was the read and re-read letter; and that such things could be ended so, by two hundred stale, worn words.